an act to limit the number of rounds of interviews for a position to a maximum of three

What are we but the remnants of Minoan Civilization?

Theo Landsman@ordinalandsman.bsky.social · last wk.

Just in terms of discursive balance I feel like for every annoying 'empires collapse after 250 years guy' there should be someone who thinks no empire has ever died. It's not a meaningfully more wrong position.

One thing I don't really understand is why we don't see more slopulism about the type of stuff where the typical slopulist outcome 'do a lot of damage to various institutions without accomplishing notional goals' would be a net good. Slopulism about gambling, social media corps, etc.

It's crazy that at this point the one hope for UK Labour is that Starmer was such a uniquely gormless leader that someone running the same playbook but with some semblance of decision making capability and vision can turn things around, wouldn't rule it out though.

Alasdair Mackenzie@alasdairmackenzie.bsky.social · 2w ago

Mahmood as Home Secretary is incredibly bad. Burnham has learnt very little from the collapse in Labour’s vote and the rise of Reform

Someone just sent me this photo from Chicago, unbelieveable

Maine Senate thoughts: 1) The fight agency types are right that Dems should adopt a higher variance approach to candidate selection in races they've repeatedly failed to win including standing down to support Independents in states where a Dem winning is almost impossible.

I am a sort of in favor of the SC drive to deregulate campaign finance because IMO they've fallen into the classic libertarian blunder of assuming that deregulation will lead to a laissez faire utopia when it will massively boost the advantage to the party with larger more effective organizations.

STRAIT IS OPEN

George Pearkes@peark.es · last mo.

We're getting some really encouraging headlines from Hormuz today. *USUAL HORMUZ TRAFFIC LANE MAY HAVE ABOUT 80 MINES: IMO

FWIW I think it's pretty clear that Mamdani betrayed Espaillat, but that's what politics is, sometimes you have to backstab people. The period of NYC politics between FDR becoming governor and becoming prez was basically 'FDR backstabs the entire NYC political class before they can backstab him.'

We joke a lot about rule by paradox gamers, but if Keir Starmer was a start in a paradox game there would be at least four totally distinct viable strategies for becoming one of the most impactful PMs of all time.

I get the evangelical tyranny of small differences/heresy vs apostasy argument that Talarico being a lib protestant is worse than being nothing, but by the same logic the worst possible person is someone who claims to be the exact same kind of christian as you and is also a moral abomination.

Decided to lookup Paxton’s victory speech to see if there’s something redeeming about his performance that doesn’t come through in the stills where he looks like a frog someone stepped on, and somehow inexplicably he has NPR voice.

IMO there is a fair amount of motivated reasoning that goes into scaling the data that creates this kind of chart, but a lot of people's reactions to this stuff just reflect having very bad intuitions about what it looks like when a group is negatively selected.

Dreamweasel@dreamweasel.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Diversity of thought” is an expression invented by conservatives to imply that rejection of their ideas is a form of bigotry

not unrecognizable but he does look like if Belgium had a dictator

Page Six@pagesix.com · 3mo ago

John Travolta looks unrecognizable at Cannes Film Festival with wild new look

One thought I keep having re: Callais, beyond dummymander wish casting, VRA districts anchored Dems in the South to a specific vision of their state parties and their relationship to the national party. All gone now and we really have no idea how much the party in these states will change to adapt.

One thing I've been thinking about since the election results, devolution in the UK is a little silly but it's wild how much structural experimentation the regional govts in the UK have done while U.S. states have stronger powers and fewer constraints but mostly choose to LARP as the US Congress.

Josh Fruhlinger@jfruh.bsky.social · 3mo ago

honestly fun that scotland, wales, and northern ireland all have election systems that are wildly different from the overall UK parliament and from one another

Glad people are coming around and this is a good piece overall, but, I'm consistently shocked by how few American political scientists know that PR is *better* for local representation than single member districts when it's a consistent finding in comparative politics with a robust theory behind it.

Matt Glassman@mattglassman312.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Piggybacking on an excellent @leedrutman post, I'm all in favor of undoing the Uniform District Act and seeing if federalism can get some proportional representation going somewhere in the U.S. blog.mattglassman.net/gerrymanderi...

Great story that covers some of the gaps in my understanding of the Platner story, basically: 1) National anti-establishment Dems discover and promote Platner, introduce him to local prog and union groups. www.bangordailynews.com/2026/05/01/p...

Behind the scenes of Janet Mills’ US Senate campaign collapse

Mills led a poll released in December, but things changed dramatically after that. Earlier this month, reporters watched her speak with a few local officials on the second floor of a nearly empty Indi...

bangordailynews.com

I've been resisting it, but I think I've been @leedrutman.bsky.social pilled on proportional representation for america. It doesn't prevent democratic backsliding in all countries — and can sometimes facilitate it. But it seems like a uniquely appropriate solution for the US' current problems.

Old Soviet joke, man is arrested for waving around a sign that says 86-47. He explains to the Department of justice that he only meant peacefully voting out of office or impeaching 47 for his many crimes. DoJ replies: 'Don't be foolish, we all know the only way to 86-47. '

Trump knows Vance wants to be president but thinks he should aim higher at being the world’s second catholic integralist astronaut.

post malone ergo propter malone@proptermalone.bsky.social · 4mo ago

sorta think one of the reasons Trump keeps deploying Vance overseas is that he’s hoping something magical happens

I went down a rabbit hole about messianism in the Haredi community recently and the responses I’ve gotten when I’ve mentioned it to orthodox and ex-orthodox people are some of the strangest talking points I have maybe ever heard about why something they’re clearly deeply alarmed by is a non-issue.

I find this line deeply frustrating and tedious, impeachment as a method of holding govt ministers accountable barely worked and was abandoned in the UK, then never worked for 2+ centuries in the U.S., it’s not a scandal that something that never worked and was never going to work didn’t work.

Jamal Greene@jamalgreene.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Constitutional lawyer here. I don't think it would violate the Constitution for the VP/Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, but the intended constitutional remedy for this behavior is impeachment & removal. The fact that that remedy is politically impossible is a scandal and a crisis.

Ok, serious poli-sci methods question, how common is running analysis in the cloud at this point. I have been optimizing something so it can run on <16GB of memory (ie actually run in R on my PC) and I want to hype this as a replication feature but worried I’ll get a lot of ‘just use AWS’ feedback.

I totally believe that term limits erode expertise and move power from Congress to external party orgs and lobbyists. The thing is that there are still people outside Congress who would like Congress to do its job. There don’t seem to be many of those people in Congress.

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 4mo ago

It's political science conventional wisdom that Term Limits Are Bad. This is from studies mostly of state legislatures, on the effect of limits of about 8 years. Very different from the effect of something like 20-year term limits for the Supreme Court, or even for Congress.

The disconnect about the Iran War and TACO is that TACO works because markets get to avoid a panic sell off and Trump retains agency to do the same thing again later, but Iran's leadership can't let up while that agency exists because they value being alive for longer than the next ~ two years.

I'm sorry, but no, Trump does not have a pet Bishop named Robber Baron. This was fine as an April fools joke but it's time for the writers to give him a real name that is less immersion breaking.

Christopher Hale@christopherjhale.bsky.social · 4mo ago

BREAKING: A leaked video shows Bishop Robert Barron skipped part of Holy Week in his home diocese to co-host a partisan White House prayer vigil. At the event, President Trump compared himself to Jesus Christ. Bishop Barron clapped after those remarks.

Of the many horrible things the Trump admin has done perhaps the worst is that it has forced me to pay enough attention to markets that I immediately understood what these were without labels like some sort of stock pervert.

Comfortably Numb@numb.comfortab.ly · 4mo ago

I like it how you can see the time when Trump's speech occured